CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Violence of Pluralism: Urban Transformations and New Political Subjectivities in the Rebellious Mediterranean

Those involved in or following our Mediterranean Project might find the following interesting:

 

As part of the annual Mediterranean Meeting to be held in Mersin, Turkey (March 20-23, 2013) Daniel Monterescu and I are coordinating a workshop on the links between violence, pluralism, urbanism and the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe.

Violence of Pluralism: Urban Transformations and New Political Subjectivities in the Rebellious Mediterranean

We seek empirical and theoretical papers addressing these processes from young and established scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Contemporary and historical perspectives are both welcome.

The organizers will provide partial funding for travel expenses of select participants.

The deadline for abstract submission is September 15. Decisions will be made my early October. Final papers are due by February 15.

For more details see: http://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/RobertSchumanCentre/Research/InternationalTransnationalRelations/MediterraneanProgramme/MRM/Mrm2013.aspx

To send your abstract, fill in the online form at: http://www.rscas.org/application/?p=apply&appl=mrm2013

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Journal of History and Cultures

The Journal of History and Cultures (JHAC) is issuing a Call for Papers for our next issue and welcomes articles on subjects in the fields of history and cultures within a broad geographic and chronological range. We are also accepting book reviews.

 

JHAC is a peer-reviewed journal and an excellent new publishing opportunity both for postgraduates and established academics. Articles should be 5,000-7,000 words in length. We encourage articles that consider and engage with historical, cultural, political, social, and theoretical research in new and original ways. Reviews should be 750-1,000 words in length. Review essays should be in-depth engagements with recent books which develop an argument to complement the reading of the text. A list of books available for review will be appearing on our website; alternatively, you can contact our reviews editor directly to request a specific book to review at jhac@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

The deadline for submissions is 1st October 2012.

Full submission and formatting guidelines can be found at: http://historyandcultures.com/submissions/

Finally, we invite you to join the JHAC community on both Facebook and Twitter @UOBJHAC for regular updates.

We are offering a £50 prize for the best article.

Please email all submissions and address any enquiries to jhac@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

NOTICE: Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline Conference

Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline
Faculty of Law and Paul-Andre Crepeau
Centre for Private and Comparative Law,
McGill University, Montreal Conference

28 29 September 2012, Faculty of Law, McGill University
The Paul-Andre Crepeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law and the Faculty of Law of McGill University will host Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline, an international conference that will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the McGill BCL/LLB Program. This event will aim to foster a debate that critically assesses the latest developments in legal thought and innovative approaches to law, in the light of the challenge of globalization and the move away from a national paradigm for understanding law. It will also ask the question of how to integrate the insights so gained into the teaching of law. The concern is with law in all its dimensions: public and private, local and transnational, formal and informal. By being forced to abandon, at least in part, the posited law of the nation state as their lode star, legal education and legal scholarship have been presented with an opportunity to break the mould of centuries of legal nationalism: an opportunity that encourages new, transdisciplinary and transnational ways of thinking about law. In short, the goal is to re-assess and to re-imagine the discipline of law, its place in the university, and its role in society.

THEMES: Some of the themes which will be covered are: (view online programme): How do globalization and legal pluralism affect our understanding of law and legal education? In its interaction with other disciplines, how does law preserve its disciplinary identity? Can a renewed understanding of particular fields of law shed light on our evolving understanding of the discipline? How is the teaching and research of basic private law-contracts, civil wrongs, property, the law of persons-affected by the increasingly transnational and transdisciplinary focus of legal scholarship?

The working languages of the conference will be English and French.

SPEAKERS: Confirmed speakers include:
- Professor Louis Assier-Andrieu (Sciences Po Paris)
- Professor George Bermann (Columbia University)
- Professor Hanoch Dagan (Tel Aviv University)
- Professor John Gardner (University of Oxford)
- Hon. Nicholas Kasirer (Quebec Court of Appeal)
- Professor Ralf Michaels (Duke University)
- Professor Annelise Riles (Cornell University)
- Professor Stephen Toope (University of British Columbia)
- Professor Ernest Weinrib (University of Toronto)
- Professor Frederic Zenati-Castaing (Lyon III University)

REGISTRATION/FURTHER INFORMATION: More information, detailed program and registration online: http://www.mcgill.ca/stateless

Take advantage of our early bird price (save 50$) until August 1, 2012. A request for Continuing Legal Education accreditation has been made to the Barreau du Quebec.

NOTICE: Indigenous Nations & Peoples Law eJournal

The always interesting Indigenous Nations & Peoples Law eJournal on SSRN has announced the following work:

• Alleviating the Tension between Species Preservation and Religious Freedom - Kathryn E. Kovacs, Rutgers School of Law – Camden
• Tribes, Land, and the Environment (Introduction) - Sarah Krakoff, University of Colorado Law School, and Ezra Rosser, American University - Washington College of Law
• Legal Pluralism and the Continuing Quest for Legal Certainty in Ecuador: A Case Study from the Andean Highlands -Marc Simon Thomas, affiliation not provided to SSRN
• Bringing Balance to Mid-North America: Re-Structuring the Sovereign Relationships between Tribal Nations and the United States - Angelique Townsend EagleWoman, University of Idaho - College of Law
• Ipeelee and the Pursuit of Proportionality in a World of Mandatory Minimum Sentences - Debra L. Parkes, University of Manitoba - Faculty of Law

NOTICE: Legal History e-Journal

SSRN’s Legal History e-Journal has noted the following articles:

• Twenty-First Century Outlawry: Historical Principles for Conducting Targeted Killings in Accordance with Due Process - Jane Y. Chong, Yale University - Law School
• Baltimore after the War of 1812: Where Robert Mills Met His Waterloo and When James A. Buchanan Broke the Bank - Garrett Power, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
• The Generality of Law - Timothy A.O. Endicott, University of Oxford - Faculty of Law
• Authoring an Invention: Patent Production in the Nineteenth-Century United States - Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University - School of Law
• The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution - Malick W. Ghachem, University of Maine School of Law
• Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland: An Inventory - Bill Rolston, University of Ulster - Transitional Justice Institute
• The Critical Promise of the New History of European Law - Peter L. Lindseth, University of Connecticut School of Law
• The Judge and the Historian: Transnational Holocaust Litigation as a New Model - Leora Bilsky, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law
• Legal Systems and Informal Authorities - Nils Jansen, University of Muenster

The abstract of the last article reads:

The article considers the nature of authorities in the law, and, specifically, the often undervalued yet important role played by informal auctoritas, by contrast with formally binding enactments. It explores the terminological difficulties within modern discourse which make discussion and understanding of such informal authorities difficult. Exemplarily, the status of Roman sources in the ius commune is considered in detail, establishing the informal criteria which determine their authoritative quality - belief in the extraordinary quality of the texts and the jurists’ mutual expectations of applying them. The analysis then proceeds to modern German practice and the enormously significant role played by learned Commentaries in the work of practising lawyers and courts – a phenomenon difficult to explain without recourse to a concept of informal authority. Finally, this understanding is demonstrated in the context of transnational private law by reference to the modern phenomenon of non-legislative codifications, such as the American Restatements, the Principles of European Contract Law and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts; all those codifications have gained a substantial informal authority as reference texts for international legal discourse.

NOTICE: Latest Issue of Jurisprudence

The last issue of Jurisprudence is now published:

The Articles include:

 

The Jurisprudence Annual Lecture 2012: Making Laws Better or Making Better Laws?

Onora O’Neill

What Conscience Can Do for Equity

Irit Samet

Three Versions of Liberal Tolerance: Dworkin, Rawls, Raz

Denise Meyerson

There is also an interesting ‘Discussion’ on ‘Custom and Living Law’:

Introduction

Donal Coffey

On Law and Justice in Community

Paul Brady

The Legitimate Authority of the Living Law

Oran Doyle

Rescuing Living Law from Jurisprudence

Marc Hertogh

On the Spontaneous Sources of Law

Garrett Barden

Living Law, Normative Pluralism, and Analytic Jurisprudence

Tim Murphy

CALL FOR PAPERS: Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranea

Readers interested in our work on legal and normative hybridity, including our conference in Malta (2010) and subsequent collection on the subject, might be interested in the

"Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranean” Conference

The Mediterranean Institute at the University of Malta and the Institute of Mediterranean Studies of Busan University announce a conference on  “Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranean” to be held in Malta  7- 9 February 2013.

 

The aim of this International Conference is to bring leading international experts from diverse humanistic and social sciences to discuss both the historical and the contemporary aspects of religion in the Mediterranean. The theme of Secularization, Mysticism and Hybridities will be explored through the continuous interplay and/or influence that exists between Religion and Society in Mediterranean Cultures.

The conference organisers invite academics and other experts who would like to act as panel convenors to submit proposals for panels for consideration by the organizing committee. Panels should be composed of 3-5 contributors with each contribution not exceeding 30 minutes in length. Panel convenors should identify the topic and the contributors and will be responsible for the organization of the panels. Furthermore, the panel convenors will be invited to act as reviewers in the call for contributions from individual academics and researchers who would like to participate in this conference.

CALL FOR PANELS: 2013 Commission on Legal Pluralism (CLP) conference

The call for panels for the 2013 Commission on Legal Pluralism (CLP) conference is closing on August 3, 2012.

 

This conference is organized in conjunction with the IUAES Congress entitled ‘Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds’ in Manchester (UK), and will take place on August 5-10, 2013 (see http ://www . iuaes2013 . org/).

Please directly upload your title, a short abstract of less than 300 characters, and a long abstract of less than 250 words, via the IUAES online proposal form.  The URL for that form is:
http ://www . nomadit . co . uk/iuaes/iuaes2013/panelproposal . php5. The IUAES will not be able to accept panel proposals after that date. Please also note that the title should be appended (IUAES Commission on Legal Pluralism).

Can you also please send an email with the same information to Janine Ubink at j.ubink@law.leidenuniv.nl.
That will allow us to include your panel proposal also on our own website.

We are also currently calling for papers. You can find the panels that have so far been accepted on the following website http ://www . nomadit . co . uk/iuaes/iuaes2013/panels . php5?View=General. For uploading a paper proposal, please go to the website and click on the panel you are interested in. Our panels are marked with (IUAES Commission on Legal Pluralism) behind the title.

If you feel your paper does not fit with any of the proposed panels, please send your paper proposal to Janine Ubink (j.m.ubink@law.leidenuniv.nl). Paper proposals should include your title, a short abstract of less than 300 characters, and a long abstract of less than 250 words. The deadline for paper proposals is August 3, 2012.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Sculpting the Human: Law, Culture and Biopolitics

16th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities
University of London, Birkbeck
March 22 and March 23, 2013

Sculpting the Human: Law, Culture and Biopolitics


 
In recent times, diverse thinkers and artists including Foucault, Derrida, Esposito, Malabou, Coetzee, Agamben, Latour, Kentridge, Nancy, Butler and Brown have raised, or attempted to re-articulate, the question of ‘the human.’ The ASLCH meeting at Birkbeck, London, invites you to (re-)consider transformations in contemporary legal arrangements in light of emerging theoretical, cultural, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, and socio-political understandings or interrogations of the ‘human’. Tapping diverse conceptualizations of the indeterminacy frequently associated with the human, conference participants are invited to engage contemporary analyses of humans, others and legal forms.

The question of the human is, in many ways, an age-old one.  In other ways, however, it is peculiarly ours as we face current debates on what it is to qualify as human, in-human or animal life. These might include, but need not be limited to, discussions on: changing political cultures of disqualified lives; re-negotiating the subjects of postcolonial governance; understanding new forms of life politics and the associated determinations of life sciences; literary and artistic chronicles of intersecting orders and disorders; science fiction’s utopian or dystopian futures; the use of warbot and drone technologies; geographies of beastly spaces; histories and ethnographies that highlight the ordering required to exact popular hierarchies; the reframed spirit of bodies; visions of who may be tortured, or locked away as inhuman; critical images of human and animal rights; deployed governmental homologies between beasts and sovereigns; biopolitical frames that prefigure subjects through statistics, demography, neuroscience but also via ‘immunization’, ‘plasticity’, and so on.

Law is a place where these orders, distinctions and divisions are frequently navigated, constituted, articulated, shared and enforced. The narratives, rights, justifications, punishments and neglect represented or contested through law intimate the legal codes by which humans and others are drawn into orders of the governed. Participants are encouraged to reflect on this broad, but not exclusive, conference theme.

NOTICE: Adams and Bomhoff on Practice and Theory in Comparative Law

As part of a bumper crop of comparative collections, readers will want to look out for Maurice Adams and Jacco Bomhoff (eds), Practice and Theory in Comparative Law (2012):

What does doing comparative law involve? Too often, explicit methodological discussions in comparative law remain limited to the level of pure theory, neglecting to test out critiques and recommendations on concrete issues. This book bridges this gap between theory and practice in comparative legal studies. Essays by both established and younger comparative lawyers reflect on the methodological challenges arising in their own work and in work in their area. Taken together, they offer clear recommendations for, and critical reflection on, a wide range of innovative comparative research projects.

The contents include:

• Comparing law: practice and theory, Maurice Adams and Jacco Bomhoff
• Reflections on comparative law methodology – getting inside contract law, Catherine Valcke
• Reasoning with previous decisions, Jan Komárek
• Comparing legal argument, Jacco Bomhoff
• In search of system neutrality: methodological issues in the drafting of European contract law rules, Gerhard Dannemann
• Comparative law and global regulatory convergence: the example of competition law, David J. Gerber
• Reflections on comparative method in European constitutional law, Monica Claes and Maartje de Visser
• Rethinking methods in European private law, Jan M. Smits
• Transnational comparisons: theory and practice of comparative law as a critique of global governance, Peer Zumbansen
• Comparative constitutional compliance: notes towards a research agenda, Frederick Schauer
• Quantitative methods for comparative constitutional law, Anne Meuwese and Mila Versteeg
• Comparisons in private patrimonial law: towards a bottom-up approach using (cross-cultural) behavioural economics, Julie de Coninck
• Against ‘comparative method’: explaining similarities and differences, Maurice Adams and John Griffiths
• Comparative law as an act of modesty: a pragmatic and realistic approach to comparative legal scholarship, Koen Lemmens